Why AI Will Promote Your Finance Team (If You Let It)
Created with ChatGPT
From Churn to Strategy: AI's Quiet Revolution in Finance Ops
If you’re in finance operations and feeling like AI is circling your role like a hawk, I’ve got some good news: it’s not here to take your job. It’s here to promote you. That is, if you’re ready to stop doing the doing, and start managing the machines that will.
Let me explain.
Remember When Finance Was Just... Numbers?
We used to think finance operations was about reconciling invoices, tracking supplier payments, and firefighting misallocations. Accounts payable and receivable technicians were hands-on and heads-down. But here’s the shift: the new finance operations professional is set to become less of a technician and more of a product manager.
That means managing AI agents the way product owners manage features. You’ll be coordinating the tools that are ingesting, analysing, and automating the reconciliation process.
The best finance teams won’t be the ones with the fastest spreadsheets, they’ll be the ones who teach AI to spot trouble before it happens.
Okay, But What Does That Actually Look Like?
Picture this:
AI handles 95% of invoice matching, supplier receipts, automated dunning cycles and bank reconciliations.
Your team focuses on reviewing exceptions flagged by the AI, not line-by-line checking.
Instead of churning through data, you’re improving the processes that generate it.
That means understanding how to train your AI tools, which only works if your data is clean, structured, and understood. So yes, there's a front-loaded effort. But it will pay off in scale, consistency, and clarity.
But This Isn’t Plug-and-Play. It’s Learn-and-Lead.
If you’re waiting for a magical platform to show up and do this work for you, you’re going to wait a long time. AI in finance isn’t an overnight fix, it’s a serious shift in mindset.
You need to:
Get a grip on your internal data sources (no more "we think the report lives somewhere in the shared drive")
Understand your existing processes
Train your team to guide AI, not just prompt it
Accept that mistakes will happen early and they’re teachable moments for your models and your team
And that last point is the most exciting one. The more the team learns, the more the AI learns, the more exceptions get flagged before they become problems. It doesn’t just spot errors. It prevents them.
Let’s Get Real About the Investment
Here’s the part that doesn’t make the headlines: getting to this AI-enhanced future takes significant investment by companies. Not just in tools, but in time, training, leadership alignment, and a serious cultural shift.
Despite all the noise about AI slashing jobs or solopreneurs making millions with chatbots (those are edge cases, not enterprise blueprints), transforming a large finance operation is a major undertaking.
This isn't a silver bullet. It's a layered, trial-and-error journey that requires:
Executive sponsorship and buy-in across all levels of the organisation
Safe environments to experiment, fail, learn, and iterate
A clear-eyed view that AI will fix some things—but not everything
Most importantly, it all hinges on data and processes. Your AI is only as smart as the data it’s trained on. If your data is inconsistent, inaccessible, or poorly structured, then no AI can save you. Which is why any serious AI strategy has to begin with a serious data strategy.
Robot with burnout trying to fix everything - created with ChatGPT
So Is AI Taking Over or What?
Yes and no. AI will absolutely take over the churny, manual parts of finance roles. But it’ll expand the human part: critical thinking, creativity, decision-making, exception handling, relationship building and process improvement.
You won’t be reconciling numbers. You’ll be reconciling systems.
And here’s the kicker for leadership: managing these AI-powered teams will require a different style. Less about task oversight, more about:
Coaching your team to work with AI tools
Building a culture that embraces human-centred AI
Letting go of old metrics like ‘invoices processed’ and focusing on issues prevented and first time pass rates
The Future of Finance Is Thinking Work
Here’s my final take: the more your teams can shift from “doing” to “thinking about the doing,” the better off you’ll be as you embrace AI technology. And the more confident your team will feel when someone inevitably asks, “Is AI going to replace us?”
The answer? It might replace what you used to do. But it’ll also promote you to do more meaningful work.
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